Where (or whether) to put criticism on Uncompromising Honor?

Frank777 wrote:- The 'silver bullet' of Mesa to take out the new system. So no new research is done on detecting spider drives, the weakness of the new "Manty" system (Sherlock) is never considered... Mesa can think of this approach, the experienced Manticore scientists would never think up the same, even when they did this themselves (Honor when she attacked while using the Apollo missile system)? I guess this is theoretically possible, but I find it rather unlikely. The moment a new weapon system is thought up, some people are tasked to consider how to deal with it from the pov of the enemy.

- It is unimaginable for me that starfaring people would make space-capable hubs unable to evacuate quickly. If million of people would cause trouble, at least a happy few should be able to go away fast. The idea that places are allowed to exist where evacuation takes 45 minutes to get out ... no, I doubt that would be done in a society where people clearly act as smart as possible. Nobody would ever allow such death traps in space. Problems existing due to large numbers and capacity problems, yes. Not for small numbers of people.

Jonathan_S wrote:[The 'silver bullet' of Mesa to take out [Mycroft]]

For the first quoted paragraph I think you're overlooking the time factor (because it's taken David many times longer to write the books than the time elapsed within them - so we've been thinking about the issues for years while the characters have barely had months)

I'm sure Manticore was aware of the vulnerability of Mycroft. They obviously didn't expect quite so effective a preemptive attack as Silver Bullet pulled off, but they knew that this design was vulnerable to having the relays taken out. But keep in mind the timeline, the events at Beowulf are happening like 6 months after the formation of the Grand Alliance. Raging Justice reached Manticore in June of 1922 PD and the chapter describing the Silver Bullets slipping in the Beowulf space was marked December 1922 Post Diaspora. Mycroft, at least the current version, is something RFC referred to as a duck tape solution - they basically bolted existing hardware together to make an initial capability. It obviously needs more stealth and/or redundancy - but the possibility of a decapitation attack would have been considered; it was just IMO accepted as a risk in order to get something in place ASAP.

The spider detection research has a similar timing concern. The first time anybody on Manticore got any hint of the Spider Drive was in February 1922 PD when Oyster Bay struck. So 10 months or less (and even less since Dr Simones arrived who could maybe give them some more clues about it) I'm sure that Manticore, and later Haven and Beowulf have all been frantically working on better ways to detect Spider Drives. But breakthroughs take time; so it doesn't surprise me much that they don't have new methods developed and deployed yet.

As for Beowulf's orbital cities, they've been there growing for centuries. This isn't the ISS which is one puncture away from potential total air loss, this is kilometers and kilometers or urban volume well capable of sheltering people in place from most disasters. Building in the capability to evacuate cities in 45 minutes or less would take astronomical effort. Our modern day cities take days to evacuate. And a city today would be almost as vulnerable to a cargo container bomb that size as Beowulf's stations were. I'm not at all surprised that after decades and centuries of safe occupancy of space that many systems are willing to build stations that are more akin to permanent large towns or cities - and are just as hard to quickly evacuate. (But I do agree with kzt that the military and civilian operations should be kept to entirely different stations - and further that the kinds of meetings of high level officials really should have been happening on the higher security military stations)

Frank777 wrote:

The spider detection research has a similar timing concern. The first time anybody on Manticore got any hint of the Spider Drive was in February 1922 PD when Oyster Bay struck. So 10 months or less (and even less since Dr Simones arrived who could maybe give them some more clues about it) I'm sure that Manticore, and later Haven and Beowulf have all been frantically working on better ways to detect Spider Drives. But breakthroughs take time; so it doesn't surprise me much that they don't have new methods developed and deployed yet.

Actually, there was a mention in the books of a first approach to find such signatures in space - requiring even more vigilant and finetuned 'radar' approaches. It is a bit of a grey area; nothing else is mentioned, but would development stop? Manticore has the best such radar in human space, but would the rich and technically advanced Beowulf fall far behind, especially with this kind of horrible outcome? The story suggestst it does, but I find it a bit unlikely.

Frank777 wrote:Thank you for your replies! Disagreement is fine. Replies from Mr. Weber are obviously also appreciated, but I can imagine several reasons why replying may not or rarely happen.

Ok, here goes.

- An overabundance of use of a stylefigure "he would not this... not that... not such... but even then it will be such." This kind of reasoning easily takes half a page or more, and its exhausting to read when it happens a lot. Which it does, especially the latest novels.

- Too many characters, approached too little in-depth. I know there are several series happening, and the author seems to wish all characters involved everywhere. I have not read or remember all spin-offs, and personally I dont wish to keep a thesaurus to keep track of everyone. But even when using so many names is acceptable, I wish more depth in the main characters, in particular in Honor Harrington... to me, that was not the case. YMMV, obviously.

- Way too many description/build up pages. Eventually, what makes a book flow to me is about points of conflict and how they are resolved due to the characters particular strengths (or, the strength is shown by the solution). There are way too many non-resolving descriptive pages of otherwise interesting characters. Another reception? Another meeting without a conflict to sort out? Is anything new introduced, preferably in a succinct manner? I do care in a minor way, but less and less.

The above points made me skip or read diagonally many pages for 3/4 of the book.

I will put myself on even more shaky ground by the following statement:
I call this the 'too large series' syndrome. I observe in many series that the first books are generally wellpaced, succinct and fun. Editors have cut away the chaff. Later books in the series then become too long, less interesting, because there is much less good editing of books.
In all fairness, from my pov. this series suffers less from this problem than most. The last few Honor books, however, tend to shift in this direction (for me).

Then, the end of the book.

- The logic of 'we approached Mesa, they bombed themself, nobody believes us, we have a big problem' does not hold for me. For several books we see that Manticore does the right thing, experiences gigantic spinning of the news by sollies, and moves on. When bombs are not set off by Manticore, and when people claim to be part of the Mesan plot without knowing anything of the terror actions earlier experienced, it clearly means the enemy has laid more false tracks than expected. No need to panic, just tell it as it is, as done before. The despair shown is out of character. Who cares what others spin ? What does this mean, now, for us Manties? Can we find cracks in the patterns? What can we learn?

- The moment I read that many important people from Manticore are collected in a new place, the "Greyson assassination" or whatever it is called immediately comes to mind. And surprise, they die. How unexpected.
What eludes me, however, is the logic. There is evidence of very strong spying and new techniques to enslave people up to the point of immediately making them unwilling assasins. So far, only Manticore is capable, due to their allies the 'cats, to find them, and so they do on Manticore, succesfully.

So *WHY* (in capitals, italic, bold and printed in font size 100) would you ever put your important people outside this safety umbrella for a large conference? You bring the outside folks in, never the reverse. Chances are that the three huge bombs made would never have been put there on Manticore. If we can consider this kind of options nowadays with terrorism on the whole planet earth, how much more would Manticore consider such safety after decades of war and experience?

- The 'silver bullet' of Mesa to take out the new system. So no new research is done on detecting spider drives, the weakness of the new "Manty" system (Sherlock) is never considered... Mesa can think of this approach, the experienced Manticore scientists would never think up the same, even when they did this themselves (Honor when she attacked while using the Apollo missile system)? I guess this is theoretically possible, but I find it rather unlikely. The moment a new weapon system is thought up, some people are tasked to consider how to deal with it from the pov of the enemy.

- It is unimaginable for me that starfaring people would make space-capable hubs unable to evacuate quickly. If million of people would cause trouble, at least a happy few should be able to go away fast. The idea that places are allowed to exist where evacuation takes 45 minutes to get out ... no, I doubt that would be done in a society where people clearly act as smart as possible. Nobody would ever allow such death traps in space. Problems existing due to large numbers and capacity problems, yes. Not for small numbers of people.

I imagine that mr. Weber wanted to get back to a situation that few people have to get together to sort the trouble, a smart ploy in a series like this. The way chosen however feels unlogical to me. And that diminishes the book to me.

I am curious about your replies. Forgive me for any bad grammar, English is not my native language.

Kind regards,
Frank

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The orbial habitats are not military installations. They are CITIES inhabited by civilians. They have been built over centuries. Safety systems are designed to deal with plausible natural events such as meteor impacts, not military attack. They are no more difficult to evacuate than American cities which were potentially vulnerable to nuclear attack for decades.

kzt wrote:Since the don't have either the theory, the design or actual spider hardware it's kind of odd to expect them to have made much progress in dealing with it. It's like my coming up with a yeti detector to sell you. Is the fact that I don't detect any yetis because they are not there, or is it because my yeti detector doesn't really work? How are you going to determine which is the case?

Jonathan_S wrote:RFC did say here (may need to scroll down to find his post) bck in April in the "Spoiler!!... Mycroft and UH" thread that Beowulf actually did install a perimeter of radar pickets to try to detect spider ships sneaking into the system. Trying to prevent a repeat of Oyster Bay. Unfortunately that's not how the Silver Bullets got there. A perfectly ordinary freighter dropped them off after penetrating that perimeter radar fenche on it's way to conduct perfectly legitimate business at Beowulf.

Beowulf either didn't have the time, resources, or forethought to put in additional system wide radars able to spot something as stealthy as a recon drone (the perimeter system was, remember, designed to look for ships. Even the stealthiest starship is going to be easier to spot than a much smaller drone built with the same stealth systems)

And there are good reasons not to put active radar shells around each Mycroft relay -- that defeats the point of trying to hid them and tells enemies where to attack to cripple them. No need to infiltrate long lasting drones to slowly ID them based on sporadic FTL test messages if you're busy broadcasting their positions.

Still it is clear that what Beowulf had put together utterly failed in the face of Silver Bullet. Good thing the Apollo control missile "AI" is capable enough to get adequate hit percentages in autonomous mode after the FTL control links were lost.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The orbial habitats are not military installations. They are CITIES inhabited by civilians. They have been built over centuries. Safety systems are designed to deal with plausible natural events such as meteor impacts, not military attack. They are no more difficult to evacuate than American cities which were potentially vulnerable to nuclear attack for decades.

Frank777 wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:The orbial habitats are not military installations. They are CITIES inhabited by civilians. They have been built over centuries. Safety systems are designed to deal with plausible natural events such as meteor impacts, not military attack. They are no more difficult to evacuate than American cities which were potentially vulnerable to nuclear attack for decades.

Military personnal is trained to a much higher degree than civilians would ever be. So I expect the safety regard for places where civilians live, much higher than for military personnel. At least for hazards, like meteors, which can destroy whole living hubs.

The responses you folks give so far ont he 45 minute evacuation-logic seem to assume that living hubs in space are built up just the same as old cities on earth: hap-snap additions and lean-to's, not much plan other than adding more needed space and services. I highly doubt this would ever be the case, space seems to unforgiving to me and most sf books I read show a healthy respect for those hazards.

Cities on earth are vulnerable because you can only get out asap when you live at the edge. And that is because we generally only have '2D' transportation (via roads). Actually, if the White House was threatened, the president would be removed very fast, using helicopters, because a) he is considered important and b) helicopters work 3D. But you cant evacuate the whole of Washington due to numbers; there are not enough helicopters, there is not enough air space, to do the same to the whole population. This is actually a nice analogy to my original gripe.